The importance of guitar students seeing the destination

The importance of guitar students seeing the destination really cannot be overstated.

As you gain experience as a guitar teacher, the quality of your guitar teaching naturally improves.

Amongst other things, you develop more well-defined pathways through the complex terrain of music and guitar playing. Knowing what you should next teach your guitar students becomes more intuitive.

Guitar teachers shouldn’t just admire the scenery

Alongside these very good developments in your guitar teaching, it’s also easy to acquire a few bad habits.

One of these is neglecting to explain to your guitar students the purpose behind what is being covered in your guitar lessons.

Why are we learning this song?

What are we going to be doing after this song?

Where are we actually going with all of this?

This is desperately important for all guitar teachers to communicate to their students. It’s even more important when having your students work on material that isn’t very much fun for them.

It may be exactly what they need in order to bring future benefits, but they may not see this at the time.

Good guitar teachers don’t keep the roadmap to themselves!

As a guitar teacher you may have a vividly clear plan in your mind of where you are taking your student.

You may be absolutely right about what they need. You might have the perfect exercise or material to give them. It might be: to know and be able to change between every common chord type in at least two positions on the guitar neck.

You may have chosen the current song specifically because it uses two chord shapes the student hasn’t learned yet.

Great!

But, if you don’t communicate this to your guitar students then, as far as they’re concerned, you’re just giving them a random series of unrelated tunes.

This might be good enough for a student in their early days of guitar playing but it’s unlikely to remain fulfilling for long. With these situations in mind, it should be easy to see the importance of guitar students seeing the destination.

Good communication is key to good guitar teaching

We all need to have clear destinations in mind when it comes to something as long term as mastering a musical instrument. It gives us a sense of purpose, helps to keep morale high and drives us on to greater success.

Whatever stage your guitar students are at, make sure they can see the relevance of what you teach them. Do this every step of the way and you will get better results, happier students, and you will be a better, more successful guitar teacher.

Stuart Bahn

Stuart Bahn is a professional guitar teacher in London, and creator of the Be A Guitar Teacher video course.